Unanswered Questions
224 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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Saussure says meaning is defined negatively, but is it equivalent to including context?
In this course lecture We discuss signs and meaning:
"Saussure says: Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results
solely from the simultaneous presence of ...
CommunityBot
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Is there any language with an "if and only if" word?
It is interesting to me that there does not appear to be a single word conveying the logical notion of "if and only if", a.k.a. bi-implication.
Is there any example of such a word?
("Is&...
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Extensional context: "S believes in x"
I know that there is some research in philosophy on the difference between (A) "S believes that p" and (B) "S believes in x" (e.g. H. H. Price and Gendler Szabó). But I cannot find ...
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How do I tell when a sentence is totally meaningless?
Consider the sentence:
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
It is meaningful, but to a person like me who does not know what the words "ontogeny", "recapitulation" and "...
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What did they do in Old English when using the instead of an?
I know that in Old English the would place n infront of words that start with a vowel after saying the word a but did they still do it when they said the? For example would a napron stay as the napron ...
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What is the difference between a seme and a morpheme?
Would you please assess the definitions below for me to see if I have correctly understood the concepts?
Seme: Semes are the smallest units of meaning of a morpheme.
Morpheme: A morpheme is the ...
CommunityBot
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Are there languages that are only demonstrably related within the same family by looking at other languages in the same family?
What I mean is whether there are known languages which, when compared between only themselves, cannot be conclusively shown to be within the same family, but which can be shown to be related when &...
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Meaning of tags starting with §§ and § in syntax structure software
So I have been working with a syntax parsing software called VISL (https://edu.visl.dk/visl/en/parsing/automatic/parse.php) to generate data about every word in a paragraph. I'm programming the ...
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Dependency grammar based dictionary
A presupposition of constructing the dependency semantic structure of a sentence is the knowledge of semantic features of all sentence's semantemes (actants, semantemes' nature as predicate or name ...
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Is it possible to define a concrete object with language clearly and accurately?
How do we know whether counterexamples of a concept are infinite or finite? Is there an end to the process of revision?
It is usually claimed that defining a concept clearly and accurately is almost ...
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If we find homophones, how do we decide whether or not they are different words?
This seems to have an easy resolution for situations its perhaps semantically or syntactically obvious (like can as in container vs can, or no vs know) that we have more than one word. But I got to ...
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Semantic loans; words borrowing a meaning already there?
What exactly is a semantic loan, how can a word borrow a meaning it already has?
I am trying to figure out whether there are any limitations (can we choose any morphemes) on the recipient word and the ...
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English native intuitions about combining `only' with ellipsis
I am interested in the following sentence:
Only Bill can fix his car and only Jack cannot
where the universe includes Bill, Bill's car, Jack, Jack's car and optionally Jeff and Jeff's car.
Also, his ...
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What is the semantic type and the lexical entry for 'to be right'?
Does somebody know what the lexical entry for '(be) right' is? And the semantic type of 'right' when its in the syntax tree.
Is it an attitude predicate?
For example in the sentence 'Beth is right ...
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Do all tautologies mean the same thing in Formal Semantics?
Since all tautologies share the same truth condition, that they're true no matter what, do all of them mean the same thing in Formal Semantics? Or does Formal Semantics analyze meaning beneath the ...
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